Lauren Mayer: Viral For Old People

By Lauren Mayer, on Wed May 27, 2015 at 8:30 AM ET

When I started posting weekly political comedy songs on youTube, my teenage son tried to caution me against unrealistic expectations. “You know, Mom, anything over 100 views is viral for old people.” But it turns out there are more fans of political comedy out there than he thought, and even some of us ‘old people’ know how to use computers to check out videos. Not that I’ve rivaled Gangnam Style, or even most funny cat videos, but most of mine get into the mid 3-digits, and some go quite a bit higher.

So far I haven’t been able to draw too many conclusions about what makes one of my videos hit higher numbers – I’ve gotten into 4 figures with ones I really worked on, ones I threw together, some are parodies of recognizeable songs but other recogizeable parodies don’t seem to hit. But there are certain hot button issues I can count on, and none more reliably than gun control.

Of course, most of the increased number of views come from people who really, really, REALLY disagree with me, and let me know in the comments. The first time I did a gun control song, the comments were quite disturbing – tons of horrible language, vile insults and even threats. But then I realized that if the spelling and grammar were any indication, these folks were not going to be able to figure out where I lived. (More importantly, I also realized that they were showing off for each other more than anything else.)

The Waco shooting last week only made Texas loosen gun restrictions even more, but it did inspire me to tackle the subject once again, so let’s see what it does to my views (and my comments!):